Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Bleeding Edge

While he states things a bit more… vitriolic than I might, I wholly agree with the sentiment. Those of you who know that I’m an artist in the game industry might find that a little odd, so I’ll elaborate.

Why do Pixar movies regularly beat out Dreamworks offerings? Both produce well crafted visuals, employing bleeding edge technology. They do have slightly different target audiences, but the visuals are comparable. Monsters vs. Aliens has a character that could pass as Sully’s cousin (from Monsters, Inc.). Kung Fu Panda is perhaps the most Disneyish of Dreamworks’ lineup, as it shows a great degree of restraint and respect for the source material, but it doesn’t really offer a visual enhancement over Ratatouille or Monsters, Inc. (and some of the most visually striking sequences are the “storybook” bits that aren’t in the “full real world 3D” style).

The beating heart of Pixar’s success is the story. Solid characters drive the story. The visuals are just a means to an end. They look great, certainly, but without the lovingly crafted stories, Pixar movies would be little more than tech demos. Dreamworks is just as technically visually adept as Pixar, but their storytelling leans more to the armpit than the heart. As a result, they don’t enjoy the same level of success as Pixar, either critical or monetary.

The beating heart of a game is the fun factor. If a game looks gorgeous, but requires clinical insanity to appreciate the gameplay, it’s not much of a game. If the development budget of a game is largely bent to serve the blingy visuals, something else is getting cut, and more likely than not, it’s the stuff that actually makes the game fun (or stable).

Look at some of the most popular games out there:

Peggle is extraoridnarily low tech visually, but still has a ton of players. Ditto Bejeweled or the like. They aren’t ugly, and they have competent art direction to make them visually appealing, but first and foremost, they are fun to play. This is a big part of why handheld gaming is so significant in the industry, and why “casual” gaming and short session gaming is closer to the future of the industry than Gears of War 5.

World of Warcraft isn’t the most visually attractive game out there, but solid art direction and savvy scalable art assets are layered on top of a game that is fun to play (at least until you’re burnt out). Age of Conan has detailed art and plenty of eye candy, but just isn’t as fun to play as WoW, according to many. (I don’t speak from experience on that; AoC isn’t interesting to me, but there are those who I respect who like it more than WoW, like Openedge1.)

Uno on XBox Live has sold a few copies, and Castle Crashers is a critical and monetary success, despite graphics that aren’t appreciably advanced beyond those of a decade ago. People still play Settlers of Catan, even online, or even Risk or any of its derivatives, and they are far from pixel-shaded DX10 monstrosities.

The priority in game design should be giving the player the chance to have some fun. I love making pretty visuals as much as the next guy (and I was trained to make Pixar-level visuals; I can *do* super high end with the right tools), but constantly chasing the bleeding edge of visual prettiness means making sacrifices in time and monetary dev budgets that more often than not, could be better spent making the core game experience better, whether that means more iterative design with ugly graphics (to see if the thing *plays* well) or more features, less visual creep.

Yes, that may mean fewer artists in the industry, so I may well be shooting myself in the foot on that, but I really do think that the health of the industry depends more on making greater *games*, and not on making prettier games. If you can do both, that’s great, but if there has to be a choice made (and there usually is), even though I’m an artist, I’ll always side with making a better game.

Dress up a jerk in a $3000 suit and he’s still a jerk. Dress up a great person in a $3000 suit and you have a nice guy that looks good to boot. I like appearances to match what’s underneath but that is definitely more to do with art direction than bleeding edge graphics.

I don’t think it’s zero sum in any case. It -could- get to be zero sum without planning. Ex., you get to a point during development in which you have wasted so many resources elsewhere that you’re forced to choose between one and the other, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Of course this is possible in the same way it’s possible for arabs and israelis to live together in harmony, or for Megan Fox to slip into my bed one night telling me she can’t stand being away from me any longer.

Be careful not to confuse “not photorealistic” graphics with “simple” graphics. Even if WoW isn’t cutting edge, the graphics were still very detailed and they still had a huge art team working on the game. It’s not like a few guys in their bedrooms with a freeware art program can just knock out WoW’s art in a weekend here.

One thing that most people seem not to realize is that there are two stages for judging art in a game. The first stage is when the game is unknown; in the store you look at the back of the box, or online you go look at screenshots page. A lot of people make decisions about the quality of the game based on that. This is definitely where art trumps gameplay.

The second is when you already know the game. For the most part, art doesn’t matter once you really get into a game. I can play both Meridian 59 or LotRO and feel immersed in either one, despite the great disparity in graphics between the two games. I know that both games have gameplay I really like, and once I get into the game the graphical presentation really doesn’t matter to me. This is the same as looking at any of those older games: you don’t need to get sucked in by the graphical presentation, because you already know you love the game.

The most extreme version of this is text games. Most people reading this blog who got into graphical MMOs first probably don’t understand the draw of text games. But, to those of us who were first exposed to MUDs, we understand how immersive they can be despite a complete lack of graphics. The lack of graphics is a large hurdle to people who aren’t already in love with them given the alternatives.

What does this mean? Game developers do have to focus higher quality art making the game look fairly modern if they want to attract a wide audience. But, once people fall in love with the game, the players don’t need the shiny anymore. But, pointing to popular old games and saying, “Graphics don’t matter,” is simply mistaken.

Speaking from an overwhelming amount of personal expereince here as owner of a great but “ugly” game.

Agreed. People usually point at WoW’s “simple” graphics (and they are simple, and they were simple five years ago), but they don’t see the huge effort in art direction that’s behind those simple graphics. It ties everything together. You can show people a screenshot taken in Teldrassil five years ago and a shot taken today in Dalaran and even without showing any telling detail or interface, most people instinctively know it’s the same game and the same world.

Another success of that art direction is that most zones in WoW have a particular and very personal mood, character and personality. This can be a bit hazy to explain, but it’s I guess the visual “shape” of the feeling the zones are trying to convey. Most zones in WoW do that very well, and stand out with their own voices most of the time. This is something I’ve been missing in other MMOs since WoW; the areas look good. LOTRO, to me, has an amazing environmental quality… but the zones have no personality to me. No spark, no individual character. They look different, but don’t ‘feel’ different. It’s a difficult thing to nail, so I don’t fault Turbine in any way for not doing so.

But I do fault Turbine with their armor and weapon design (disclaimer: I played only up until Evendim, then left the game). I found 90% of weapons and wearables to be plain, boring and uninspiring. I’m not asking for Boris Vallejo meets Dali, they pop in some LSD and bring in Jodorowsky, but I got severely tired by the end of my LOTRO stint by the fact that no matter what my character could equip she always looked kinda like my grandma.

Silly as they might be, I’ll take salad shoulders over a beige raincoat any day.

Art direction is a huge key. The earlier a consistent “look and feel” can be nailed down, preferably with a design document on an internal wiki (so everyone can see it), the better. Consistency (like Julian’s comment that Dalaran *looks* like WoW) and a distinct style go much further than highly polishing a single facet of a game’s overall art.

I liken it to sketching and painting a person/character. You really need to nail down the proportions and pose in rough, fluid gesture drawings first, and only once that’s right do you start blocking in large scale structural elements. You work from vague to specific on the painting as a whole, rather than going all photorealistic on the eye… only to find out later that it’s in the wrong place. Rookie artists tend to do that, focusing on one element while ignoring the holistic design and interrelations between visual elements, and it winds up causing trouble down the road. A game with weak art direction will often wind up doing the same thing. Also, a lot of work gets thrown out if it doesn’t keep up with changes in art direction. That’s a huge waste.

I can’t help but think a lot of game design is similar, actually. Games designed holistically with strong direction from the start tend to “gel” better, and the actual production goes better, since it means less work needs to be thrown away as the backbone changes.

Note, when I write of “strong direction”, I’m not talking about micromanagement of a mutating “vision”, I’m talking about crystal clear goals and expectations that form a skeletal structure of the design, clear from the outset before any production starts, with details of implementation left to those in the trenches actually doing the work (since that’s what they were hired for, ideally). I can’t stress this enough, as it winds up being a much more effective way to manage a project.

As I am a bit more into playing GW right now, I would like to point out that ArenaNet’s Guild Wars has a very strong art direction. Especially their landscapes are amazing.

The only major problem is the many clipping issues, but this is a technical issue and, as it happens mostly with the armor of newer “chapters”, lack of time/polish. Also quite a lot of the later weapons look rather bland compared to some of the older ones, with some weapon designs being very very odd, which results in only few players using said weapon skins.

I miss the clear vision of their art direction in their game design. They initially presumed all players would turn to PvP players and lose interest, buy the next chapter half a year later and play again. It absolutely did not work out, PvE became dominant, PvP as the supposed core became the sport of a minority, especially the supposed heart, the “Guild Wars” part of Guild Wars.

So I must say they totally failed or had to change their vision over time, but GW still did fine nevertheless. 🙂
I wonder how Guild Wars 2 will be.

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